Still snowing here, moderate to heavy since Saturday morning. The snowfall on Tenjindaira reported over the last 24 hours is 80cm which is what I'm seeing at the base. There is going to be meters of snow in the gullys after this storm, a brand new mountain.

Well and truly passed the point of having enough snow here. The forecast is for it to drop right off but keep falling tomorrow and then clear.

In these conditions, Hodaigi is firing, winds are light, there is lots of pow on piste and not many people going after it.

Okutone with their new upper lift is also worth a look.

Tenjin calling a delayed open today and the storm seems to have slayed a piston bully so they are down a groomer. Ganbatte team.

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New snowfall:

80cm Tenjin40cm Hodaigi40cm Okutone

Official snow depths:

320cm Tenjin170cm Hodaigi140cm Okutone

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Oh no, it’s another general message from SnowJapan!

Apologies for taking up space on the reports again, but we have had a few people asking why our reports don’t appear much earlier in a morning. It’s a fair question and I’ll try to answer it. There are a few reasons...

First, it seems necessary to point out that we are not a ski resort and our reports are not official ski resort reports. Some people seem to think (or just presume) these things. If we owned and operated a ski resort, I’m fairly certain that we would make it a high priority to post updates as early as possible each morning - how much new snow at top and at base, snow depth, conditions. We’d also be sure to have multiple and meaningful webcams pointing out to locations around the resort. But we’re not official ski resorts/reports.

These things are what ski resorts should ideally be doing, right?

It varies, but a fair number of Japanese ski resorts only post their morning updates after 8am - and sometimes later. If we (SnowJapan) posted our reports earlier than we currently do, we would often miss important information - like news of how much fresh snow ski resorts are reporting, news of any early morning lift disruption at the start of the day, etc. We would often be missing that kind of information.

We like to think of our reports as a season-long ongoing commentary, rather than simply an early morning report for people who are going to be queuing for the first lift of the day. And after all, people who are lucky enough to already be at a ski resort and hitting the first lifts can get a good idea of weather conditions by taking a look outside of the window when they get up.

If we posted our reports just for the benefit of those people, the reports would not be as good or detailed as they are. We feel that our way makes for better all-round reports.

In addition, there’s also the people who post the reports and their circumstances to consider. They probably need some coffee and toast before posting, they may need to dig themselves out of their home, they may need to see to other complexities life throws at them. And - some of the reports in particular - take much longer than just a few minutes to put together each morning.

For a bit more on that kind of thing, please refer to my previous message. It can be found here:

There are many new people using the website at the moment, and our traffic records are being broken every day at the moment. Thank you. Please be sure to read our “About” pages associated with the daily report pages and ski resort listing pages – they cover a lot of information.

Thanks for reading our reports through the 16-17 season. If you are planning a trip to Japan, please do make use of our extensive reporting archives (links below) and the Snowfall Analysis page (tab at the top of this page).